Foods provide more than just physical sustenance. Food also provides enjoyment through means such as visual appeal. Many popular food items, such as cookies, cakes, and candies, comprise some sort of decoration that makes the food item more visually appealing. Printing on edible items such as snacks can provide an added level of excitement beyond the snacking itself. The printed content can be in the form of graphics, text or combinations, and it can be used to deliver, for example, games, stories, jokes, and educational facts. This new level of excitement may be, however, jeopardized by a printing system that does not fully print an image on an edible article, or prints such image out of registration. In such case, the image may not be legible or only a part of the image may be visible, causing consumer disappointment.
In the past, when printing on edible substrate sheets, properly registering an image to an individual portion has been achieved by mechanically linking the printer and the cutter. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,534,281, issued Jul. 9, 1996, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,162,119, issued Nov. 10, 1992, both to Pappas et al., it is disclosed registration of images printed on a dough sheet such that a subsequent cutter separating a portion of a dough sheet will contain a printed image and the cutter and image are in registration. In this method, this is accomplished by mechanically linking the printer and the cutter as a single unit, wherein the printer is a rotary type, such that one revolution of the rotary printer roll corresponds to one revolution of the cutter roll. Disadvantages of such a unit include that the number of images that can be used is limited to those that can fit on the limited surface area of the printer roll as a function of the size of the printer roll, thus limiting the variety of printed images that can be supplied to consumers. Furthermore, if a greater number of images are desired, the roll would need to be changed with losses of production time to change the roll, etc. Also, the printer roll is required to contact the dough sheet that can have negative sanitation implications that are difficult to mitigate.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a means to print images on an edible substrate sheet (e.g. dough sheet) whereby the number of images available for printing is not so limited and is not limited by constraints of the equipment, and still achieve proper image registration with a subsequent unit operation such as an edible substrate sheet cutter. Furthermore, it would be desirable to avoid contact of the edible substrate sheet by the printing means to avoid negative sanitation implications.
It would be, therefore, advantageous to devise methods to deliver printed content consistently on edible substrates with proper registration on edible substrates. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to do so with printing devices that allow for flexibility of image variety.